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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where all of it began in Sydney this weekend and higgledy-piggledy.xyz six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the innovative international sailing league.

An and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts partnered with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software company, wiki.whenparked.com to introduce the series with 6 groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which started in Sydney in February 2019 included just five rounds, this weekend's race will be the third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply incredible, actually, the uptake and variety of occasions now," SailGP president Coutts informed Reuters at the Sydney Opera House on Friday.

"We're certainly sitting at 13, and aiming to increase that over the next seasons to somewhere around 20. If you compare that to Formula One that has 24, that's sort of where we want to get to. So yeah, the future looks excellent."

The idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the comparison is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are spectacular speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to simply attract the passionate sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"Most of our fans are not devoted sailors, which's one of the reasons that we have actually grown so rapidly. We are interesting individuals that much like enjoying a race, they do not have to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to view Tom Slingsby's Australia team win the second round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I believe you'll see several of our events this year now like that, possibly even topping that," said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most crucial thing is the fans seeing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is also extremely crucial. We desire fans to come and have a good time and see some excellent racing."

Technological development is essential to SailGP and numerous countless data points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for using race organisers, wiki.eqoarevival.com teams and to help broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively utilized to resolve the mountain of data.

"The big development for us moving forward is the 360 degree view from on board the boat, with listening to the team comms," he said.

"The viewer will be taken on board and trip along with the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to look around wherever they want. That's the future."

There have, obviously, orcz.com been challenges over the 6 years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the grace of wind conditions.

A lack of F50s suggested the French team was not able to complete at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and fraternityofshadows.com damage to the boat once they got it ruled them out of the Auckland leg.

The full fleet of 12 boats will therefore race for vetlek.ru the first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however among the teams are, or quickly will be, privately owned or run.

"These groups are now costing $50 million, I would never ever have actually anticipated that this at an early stage," said Coutts, who prepares to bring another couple of groups on board next year.

"We knew that that was the entire method the design was established, that team owners would have the ability to trade their groups and hopefully generate income out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)